Tag Archives: childlike

Jesus is said to have held up the model of a child in helping his audience appreciate what is required to “enter the kingdom of God,” by which he did not mean an afterlife in heaven but the liberated life here and now. Preachers have been exhorting their congregations to be like children ever since, which turns out not to be such good advice after all.

The misunderstanding has to do with the difference between being childlike and acting childish. Jesus was elevating the childlike virtues of faith, wonder, and curiosity: engaging with life in this way keeps us present to what’s really going on. On the other hand, when we behave childishly we are decidedly not present to the mystery of the moment, but rather disengaged and spinning neurotically inside ourselves.

Our Western romance of childhood regards it as a time of enchantment, freewheeling fantasy, and simple innocence. Growing up caused our disenchantment and introduced us to the world of adult preoccupations, not to mention the moral ambiguity we often find ourselves in. (We’ll come back to that in a bit.)

In many of us there is a longing to return to that idyllic state, and perhaps not a few Christians regard our getting there a precondition of salvation itself (cf., the saying of Jesus).

To put things in perspective, my diagram illustrates three ‘dimensions’ of human psychology. Our Animal Nature is where psychology is rooted in biology and the sentient organism of our body. At the other end of the continuum is our Higher Self where psychology opens toward self-actualization and ‘unity consciousness’ (i.e., our sense of All-as-One). The development into maturity proceeds through a third dimension, where the personality individuates upon a separate center of self-conscious identity – the “I” (Latin ego) from which we take a uniquely personal perspective on things.

This third dimension of ego consciousness is strategically important to the awakening of our Higher Self, as it is from the vantage point of its center that we are enabled to look ‘down’ (or inward) to the grounding mystery of being, and ‘up’ (or outward) to the prospect of genuine community. The distinction of these two ‘poles’ of the continuum of consciousness – a ground within that simply is and a community beyond that only might be – is necessary to keep in mind, as our successful transit will depend on how well things go with ego formation.

For it to go well, each of us needs to achieve ego strength, which isn’t really an individual achievement so much as the outcome of a larger conspiracy of other social agents and forces, like our mother, father, other taller powers, siblings and peers. When this conspiracy is provident, our subjective need to feel safe, loved, capable, and worthy is adequately met, resulting in a personality that is stable, balanced, and unified under an executive center of identity (or ego).

As we continue our growth into maturity, our centered personality gradually takes for itself the responsibility of constructing its own ‘habitat of meaning’ or personal world. Now the story of who we are (i.e., our personal myth) is ours to determine, at least to some extent, and we have full authorial rights. This is what I mean by creative authority.

With a healthy individuated identity in place, possessed of ego strength and creative authority, we can choose to ‘drop’ from this center and into the grounding mystery within, or ‘leap’ from it in the interest of connecting in genuine community.

Either move depends on an ability to get over ourselves, which in turn is a function of that emotional complex in our personality that was our primary mode of engaging with reality in those early years, but which is now our Inner Child.

When things have gone well for us, the childlike virtues of faith, wonder, and curiosity continue to orient and inspire our adult life. We can surrender ourselves in existential trust, behold the present mystery of reality in wide-eyed astonishment, and explore its myriad features with an insatiable desire to understand.

Such virtues are at the heart of not only healthy religion, but of our best science and art as well. We are less prone to confuse our constructs of goodness, truth, and beauty with the mystery that is beyond names and forms. Instead, they can serve as symbols and guidelines leading us deeper into that mystery where All is One.

But if our early environment as actual children did not support our need to feel safe, loved, capable, and worthy, we devised ways of still getting at least some of what we needed in spite of the circumstances. A profound insecurity made us neurotically self-centered and motivated our manipulation of others for the sake of getting what we needed. For a while perhaps, it worked – but never entirely or for very long.

These childish stratagems of behavior: pitching tantrums, sulking under the covers, telling lies, intimidating our rivals, cheating the system – whatever it takes to get what we want (“Trumpence”) – are now tucked away in the repertoire of our Inner Child. Whenever our insecurity gets poked, triggered, or hooked, our adult Higher Self gets pushed offline and this emotional terrorist takes over.

This is the part of us that actually prevents our entrance to the kingdom of God. When we are in this childish mode, not only is our own grounding mystery inaccessible to us, but genuine community is an utter impossibility. Indeed, we have become its diabolical adversary.

Not really if, but to the degree that we have this diabolical Inner Child inside us just waiting to get poked, it is of critical importance that we give sufficient time and mindful practice to the activation of our Higher Self. Scolding, blaming, shaming, and punishing ourselves and each other will only keep us stuck in the neurotic spiral.

To make progress on the path, we need to remind ourselves – and occasionally be reminded – that it’s not all about us.